On Her Own Ground Read online

  Answered Prayers

  “I was on the verge of becoming entirely bald,” Sarah often told other women. Ashamed of the “frightful” appearance of her hair and desperate for a solution, she “prayed to the Lord” for guidance. “He answered my prayer,” she vouched. “For one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.” After obtaining the same results on her daughter and her neighbors, she later told a reporter, “I made up my mind I would begin to sell it.”

  But going into business had not been her original goal. “When I made my discovery, I had no idea of placing it on the market for the benefit of others; I was simply in search of something that would save or restore my own hair.” This miraculous concoction, she believed, was nothing less than “an inspiration from God,” a heaven-sent gift for her to “place in the reach of those who appreciate beautiful hair and healthy scalps, which is the glory of woman.”

  Sarah’s account of her discovery, embellished with claims of divine providence and intervention, proved to be an ingenious marketing device. By also invoking Africa, she invested her potion with the magical power of herbal medicine still practiced by some of her potential customers. Her secret ingredient, she maintained, came not from the sources known to the white-owned hair-preparations manufacturers whose ads regularly caricatured black women in St. Louis’s Negro weeklies, but from “a big black man” and the land of her ancestors. Her efforts to portray herself as a healer with a direct link to Africa were not unique. Among others, a Dr. W. D. Deshay regularly advertised his “Hair Feeder” as being “well recommended by the leading hair dressers in Biblis, Egypt and Gondar City, Abyssinia.”

  Although nothing in Sarah’s scalp ointment appears to have been available exclusively from Africa, she well may have been referring to her use of coconut oil, an ingredient that could have come from West Africa’s tropical coast. The impression that her salve contained rare and difficult-to-secure substances only enhanced her dramatic dream scenario. At any rate, all the other items—thick petrolatum for her oil base; beeswax as a stabilizer; copper sulfate and precipitated sulfur as sanitizing and healing agents; violet extract perfume to mask the sulfur; and the disinfectant carbolic acid for a separate treatment—were easily obtainable in St. Louis, because at the time only New York rivaled that city in the number of wholesale pharmaceutical houses and drug and chemical suppliers.

  When skeptics found Sarah’s story more apocryphal than verifiable, she acknowledged that “part of my story may sound strange, but it is the absolute truth.” In one ongoing dispute, however, her account would serve as a virtually unchallengeable defense to fend off a rival who claimed noticeable similarities between the hair care products they both manufactured.

  Sarah’s personal struggle with scalp disease and baldness had made her excruciatingly aware of the importance others placed on hair. Even her Bible offered no comfort. “Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? . . . If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering,” read I Corinthians. So woe be unto those women like Sarah who failed to measure up to their more generously tressed sisters. “And it shall come to pass, that . . . instead of wellset hair, baldness . . . and burning instead of beauty,” read an Old Testament passage.

  Growing up in the postbellum South, Sarah had been bombarded with messages that she was unattractive, that her frizzy, brittle hair was ugly and unsightly, that her skin color rendered her powerless. If her grandmother or mother had learned ancient African beautifying hair care techniques, those traditions were not transmitted to Sarah or her sister, Louvenia. On some plantations during slavery, such visible Africanisms—along with tribal names, drums and religious practices—were prohibited lest slaves be emboldened to plot some clandestine insurrection. Even had they been allowed, antebellum life left little chance for intricate, time-consuming braids and elaborate cornrows. And slave masters tended to mock any efforts at personal adornment as “putting on airs.” Though Sarah’s transplanted foremothers may have fashioned special garments and accessories from their limited slave-era wardrobes for Sunday worship and holiday celebrations, daily grooming, by necessity, had become utilitarian and perfunctory for all but a few black women.

  Like most late-nineteenth-century rural Americans whose crude homes lacked indoor plumbing, Sarah was ignorant of the most basic hair care hygiene. She later recalled the care she had given to laundering her clothes and those of her customers, but old wives’ tales had convinced many women—black and white—that monthly hair shampoos were more than sufficient. Some washed their hair even less frequently during the winter because they feared catching colds or pneumonia in unheated tenements and shacks. The result was rampant scalp disease: dandruff, lice, eczema, fungal infections, alopecia and tetter, a particularly pesky form of psoriasis.

  Even as a child Sarah noticed the value that was placed on hair texture and skin color. As a woman with African features, she frequently was reminded that white skin and shiny, straight hair were more prized than black skin and coiled, kinky hair.

  During slavery these obvious physical traits had effectively distinguished slave from freeman and been used to maintain social, economic and legal control over the bondsmen. By comparing blacks’ hair to that of sheep’s wool, some whites used pseudoscience as “proof” that people of African descent were more animal than human, and therefore inherently inferior. And it was not only whites who enforced a social hierarchy based on skin color. Those slaves and free people of color who could claim white ancestry—especially those whose slave-owning fathers had provided for their education in America and abroad—formed the core of an antebellum elite that clustered in Washington, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, Atlanta and a handful of other cities. Well into the twentieth century some of their descendants continued to distance themselves from their darker brethren to protect their own tenuous social standing.

  By the early 1900s, upward mobility among some formally educated and ambitious darker-skinned African Americans had begun to blur the class lines in some communities, but the merit bestowed upon long, straight hair remained. Among the women around Sarah—in her church, in her neighborhood, throughout the city—appearance correlated with prosperity. Well-groomed hair among the black elite meant hair that was not matted and scraggly like Sarah’s. For most African American women the desired look depended upon a mix of European or Native American genes, and frequently both. As Sarah continued to lose her hair, she was susceptible to the trends that were set, not just by the unattainable standards of the well-coiffed mannequins in St. Louis’s department store windows, but by those of her friend Jessie Robinson and some of the stylish middle-class women of St. Paul AME Church.

  Black men’s opinions on the subject—and their criteria for selecting marriage partners—fueled a contentious debate within the black community that Sarah herself observed. “It is generally the case that those Black men who clamor most loudly and persistently for the purity of Negro blood have taken themselves mulatto wives,” wrote T. Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, one of the nation’s most widely read black newspapers. Fortune, himself a former slave, was descended from Africans, Native Americans and Europeans, including an Irish grandfather.

  Fannie Barrier Williams, an activist and social reformer, blasted those black men who, she charged, were “apt to look to other races for their types of beauty and character . . . What our girls and women have a right to demand from our best men is that they cease to imitate the artificial standards of other people and create a race standard of their own,” she wrote. Rather than choose “the most royal queen in ebony,” alleged Nannie Helen Burroughs, an eloquent orator and masterful organizer, “there are men right in our own race, and they are legion, who would rather marry a woman for her colo
r than her character.”

  In a society that denied legal rights and economic opportunities on the basis of race and gender, Sarah and other women endured daily emotional and psychological pressure to assimilate by minimizing the physical reminders of slavery. No matter how beautiful, how well groomed, how stylish she may have managed to make herself, Sarah would never meet America’s standard of beauty. At the turn of the twentieth century that standard was the Gibson Girl.

  “You can always tell when a girl is taking the Gibson Cure by the way she fixes her hair,” said one observer of the wasp-waisted young white women created by magazine illustrator Charles Dana Gibson in 1890. All the rage for nearly two decades, this “ideal American girl,” with her “chic, haughty and graceful” pose, was in part distinguished by the long, silky tresses artfully arranged beneath the brim of her beribboned hat. The faultless Gibson Look, when attempted by women of any race or class, seemed most easily attained with the artist’s ink pen. Most black women, and certainly Sarah, were hard-pressed to twist their full lips into a dainty Cupid’s bow. That the tightly nipped Gibson torso was physically impossible to sustain for any woman who needed to exhale did not prevent American women from attempting the impossible.

  In America and in Europe, long, lustrous locks were prized for their beauty as well as for their commercial value. “Fashionable Paris alone, and London as much more,” wrote Dr. C. Henri Leonard in 1880, “consumes annually over one hundred thousand pounds of human hair in the manufacture of her chignons and wigs.” Blond hair was favored over brunet or black, bringing as much as two dollars per ounce, “if of fine quality.”

  Hair care—or the lack of it—was a carefully calibrated indicator of class, no more so than among middle-class blacks, who warily watched the steady flow of Deep South newcomers, most of them unsophisticated, uneducated and haphazardly groomed as Sarah had been when she first arrived. Newspaper editors frequently commented on the migrants coarse and country ways. “With the approach of summer comes the annual appearance of heads out of windows,” ranted a St. Louis Palladium editorial. “On Lawton, Market, Morgan, Johnson streets . . . can be seen: HEADS. NAPPY HEADS! WOOLLY HEADS! COMBED HEADS! UNCOMBED HEADS! Heads of all descriptions, especially when a band is near by or the congregation of a church is being dismissed.” While some black newspapers in other cities refused to accept ads for face bleaches and hair straighteners, St. Louis’s three black weeklies—presumably in need of the money—were filled with such promotions.

  Eager to cure her baldness, Sarah likely tried some of those concoctions, including the ones that claimed the ability to simultaneously grow and straighten hair. Had she already had healthy hair, she may have been satisfied to style it into her own black version of the proper Victorian-era coif. But because her hair was too abused and damaged to display whatever natural beauty it possessed, she was vulnerable to the patent medicine industry’s fraudulent advertising, unchecked in the heyday of cure-alls and elixirs. Not until popular magazines such as The Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s Weekly exposed these firms’ misleading claims during 1904 and 1905 did Congress take steps to pass the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, requiring the manufacturers to deliver the results they promised.

  “During my many years of research endeavoring to find something to improve my own hair, in preparations manufactured by others, I was always unsuccessful,” Sarah often said of her predream experiments. But another St. Louis woman charged that Sarah’s late-night revelation was entirely fabricated, that her “research” was filched. In fact, Annie Minerva Turnbo asserted that it was she who had “personally” restored Sarah’s hair.

  When Turnbo arrived in St. Louis in 1902 from Lovejoy, Illinois, she set up shop on bustling Market Street directly across from Tom Turpin’s always open Rosebud Cafe. An ambitious woman, whose childhood fascination with her sisters’ hair had led her into the hairdressing business, Turnbo moved to Missouri to capitalize on the hoopla surrounding preparations for the 1904 World’s Fair. Inside her four-room flat at 2223 Market Street, she specialized in scalp treatments and hair growing. After a very brief marriage to a Mr. Pope, she adopted the name Pope-Turnbo for her products.

  Exactly how Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Davis met Pope-Turnbo is unknown. After hearing of her reputation for hair restoration, Sarah may have sought her out. They could also have become acquainted through Sarah’s widowed sister-in-law, Hettie Martin Breedlove, whose family, like Pope-Turnbo’s, was from tiny Metropolis, Illinois. And just as easily, their first meeting could have been the result of a fortuitous knock on Sarah’s door. Pope-Turnbo, after opening her modest workspace, conducted a “diligent house-to-house canvass” to introduce her preparations to the women of Chestnut Valley. In order to attract potential customers, she persuaded neighborhood mothers and daughters to accept free scalp treatments.

  Some years later Pope-Turnbo would declare that she had treated Sarah on “South 16th Street,” a possible reference to 1519 Clark, the apartment near Sixteenth Street where C. J. Walker lived from 1900 to 1905. What is not in dispute is that Sarah was one of Pope-Turnbo’s earliest sales agents, probably joining her sometime during 1903.

  Pope-Turnbo claimed that, in the process of teaching Sarah her hair-growing method, she also had successfully treated the scalp ailments which had caused her hair loss. The two most likely problems—seborrhea, commonly called dandruff, and psoriasis, then known as tetter—had plagued humans for centuries. Tetter’s tiny scales itched intensely, inflaming scalps and creating sores. Dandruff—which was sometimes severe enough to cause baldness—had been likened to the mealy consistency of bran by Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, more than two thousand years ago. In chronic cases such as Sarah’s, dirt, lint and sebum—the fatty secretion from the scalp’s sebaceous glands—clogged pores, inhibited circulation and destroyed hair follicles. If Sarah used the widely distributed patent medicines that were heavily laced with alcohol and other harsh chemicals, she only made the malady worse by stripping her hair of its natural oils. From Pope-Turnbo, she may have learned to shampoo her hair more often. “Clean scalps mean clean bodies,” Pope-Turnbo preached to her clients. “Better appearance means greater business opportunities, higher social standing, cleaner living and beautiful homes,” her company literature later said. It was a self-improvement strategy that Sarah already had observed among her church sisters.

  Sarah and Pope-Turnbo had much in common. Both now in their mid-thirties, they had been orphaned as young girls and reared by older sisters, though Pope-Turnbo’s childhood seems to have been free from the physical abuse and material deprivation that Sarah endured. Her father, described as a Civil War veteran, had owned a farm in southern Illinois. Unlike Sarah, Pope-Turnbo, the tenth of eleven children, attended elementary school and at least a few months of high school until an unidentified illness caused her to end her formal studies. To distinguish her from other hairdressers, Pope-Turnbo’s official biography claimed that “with the return of her health, she turned to the study of chemistry for the scientific background which she realized was necessary to make her proficient in the art of hair culture.” In other versions of her story she said she had had “a natural gift from childhood for growing hair.”

  In 1900, when Pope-Turnbo was thirty-one years old, she moved from her sister’s home in Peoria, Illinois, to Lovejoy, where she set up a crude laboratory, developed a liquid shampoo and began her “business of beauty culture and hair dressing” in a rented “weather-beaten building.” After much trial and error, she said, she also developed her Wonderful Hair Grower. “I went around in the buggy and made speeches, demonstrated the shampoo on myself, and talked about cleanliness and hygiene until they realized I was right,” Pope-Turnbo said of her efforts to convince naysayers.

  Pope-Turnbo—and later Sarah—made much of their proprietary mixtures, but the real secret was a regimen of regular shampoos, scalp massage, nutritious food and an easily duplicated, sulfur-based formula that neither of them had origi
nated. Home remedies and medicinal compounds with similar ingredients had been prescribed at least since the sixteenth century. Later in 1842 British surgeon Sir John E. Erichsen favored “stimulating washes, ointments [and] lotions,” including solutions with copper sulfate, cayenne pepper and Spanish fly. “Beauty Notes,” a syndicated column originally written in 1904 for the Washington Star’s predominantly white readership, advised twice-daily applications of sulfate quinine, glycerin and other ominous-sounding ingredients to remedy baldness. “Shampoo with tar soap once a month and brush dandruff from the scalp every week,” the writer advised. With aspirin available for less than a decade, and penicillin’s discovery more than twenty years away, the state of American medicine, especially in regard to nonfatal skin diseases, was rudimentary at best.

  By the time Pope-Turnbo met Sarah, there were scores of packaged products—some effective, some bogus—available in pharmacies and via mail order to fill the medical void. Even Sears, Roebuck and Company advertised “Princess Tonic Hair Restorer” in its 1897 catalogue.

  In early 1880 the drug firm of Weeks & Potter began a national promotion for Cuticura—“the purest, sweetest, most effective remedies for skin, scalp and hair”—for the same ailments that troubled Sarah. “Bathe the affected parts with hot water and Cuticura Soap . . . and apply Cuticura Ointment freely, to allay itching, irritation and inflammation,” read one advertisement. Cuticura’s high-quality products attracted both white and black customers. But many other white-owned businesses openly exploited the insecurity many African Americans had developed about their distinctive hair texture. Knowing that tightly curled hair would automatically appear as much as several inches longer when straightened, these companies advertised their hair straighteners as hair “growers.” In the process they equated naturally kinky hair with inferiority and homeliness. Companies with products like Kinkilla, Kink-No-More and Straightine all presented themselves as manufacturers of the “only” and “most wonderful” products of their kind. The Boston Chemical Company claimed to have marketed its hair tonic and straightener, Ozono, to “members of the colored race” since 1875. “Ozono will take the Kinks out of Knotty, Kinky, Harsh, Curly, Refractory, Troublesome Hair,” heralded its ad. “It will make short, harsh hair long and straight” and keep hair “straight forever.”